Oracle SOA Suite Reviews

Provides connectivity between discrete systems and has availability. It has more features to connect using connectors and Adapters and also cloud integrations. The re-usability of the services makes it reliable and reduces the development efforts. 

It enables seamless integration and accountability. It has adapters for Salesforce and other cloud adapters. It has the infrastructure to re-process and troubleshoot the failed instances.

Decrease the number of internal resources which the product uses. 

We have been using this solution for ten years.

There were no deployment issues.

In the previous versions, we used to get stability issues. It has improved a lot since then.

There were no scalability issues.

Valuable features include connectors and BAM. 

We need lot of visibility into all the key functions like OM, PO, etc.  We also have lot of systems running on different platforms. SOA was used as a central hub to orchestrate all of that.

I want to see easier integration connections with other cloud-based tools. 

We have been using this for eight years.

There were some issues with deployment. It would help if there were a feature or add-on for connecting major repository versions.

Some of the valuable features of SOA Suite are obviously integration, integrating two different systems together to be able to create web services on top of back end systems and expose those both internally and externally. To be able to do transformation, translation of data so that two proprietary systems can communicate. Also really to be able to create services and APIs that can be able to support business processes as well as consumer and composite applications. Oracle SOA Suite is really designed for those types of features.

Some of the benefits of Oracle SOA are like I was talking about earlier, transformation of fields and data elements. Transaction management as you're integrating two different proprietary systems, being able to manage that transaction and an end-to-end business process.

Orchestration, the ability to be able to apply business rules and different types of rules on top of what your integration and your business processes are. The main benefit is really to integrate proprietary systems that can't naturally communicate with each other through services, through APIs and to be able to reuse those services into composite applications. Be able to reuse those services in workflows, in business processes or whatever the pattern may be. The ability to expose data between these systems as both a provider of information and a consumer of information.

More cloud adoption would be good because SOA Suite has a lot of adoption for a lot of on-premise customers and they're just getting started with the cloud adoption model. We'd also like to see some more lightweight, light-scale versions of it. It's like one of their greatest assets can also be one of their greatest detriments which is it comes so feature-rich in such a big product that it sometimes can be an expensive product. Some customers just want a low-scale, lightweight version of the tool and we see quite a bit of need for that. Some improvements on API management, the ability to create APIs on top of services to manage those and the analytics of those, would be some good features that we'd like to see as well.

Oracle SOA has been a rock solid enterprise-level tool for many years. It's really foundationally built on WebLogic and so it has a lot of scalability built into it. I've seen implementations that support millions of transactions per day, hundreds of trading partners, hundreds of web services and APIs. The scalability and the ability for capacity growth has always been there and has always been a fundamental tenet and one of the fundamental principles of Oracle SOA Suite. Because it is an enterprise service bus, it has to be able to have that level of scalability. The implementations really are dependent on what the customer use cases are. Because it's such a feature-rich product there's a lot you can do with it and there's a lot of good ways to implement SOA and there's a lot of bad ways to implement SOA.

Usually the tipping point is about 25 integrations. If a customer is hand-coding or hand developing their integrations in a custom platform like Java or  .NET. Once you hit about 25 integrations, that's a good time to say, "Hey, I may need more of a commercial platform approach where I can get features such as air handling, login, analytics, transaction management." All these that are built in into a battle-tested product, that's when you start hitting that tipping point. At about 25 integrations is when a customer should begin to look at making that type of investment.

Some of the good ways to implement SOA in a traditional, agile, system development lifecycle is really trying to understand what are the functional use cases. What is the business process that needs the support? Some of the other key aspects are being able to understand what is the universal data model that you're going to be integrating? Right? What are the fields and elements on the back ends' system that's providing the information and what are fields and elements on the consuming system? Then be able to come up with a semantic level, canonical level mapping between those two and be able to create a universal data object. Create a loosely coupled implementation.

Traditionally building integrations does follow a system development lifecycle. Traditionally going through requirements, design sessions, integration, development, testing and so forth, There's a lot of techniques to do those rapidly in an agile-like way but there's also some ways to also blueprint those so that they're well documented, well understood. It helps keep your technical debt low for organizations who have to manage and maintain these over the course of many different years. Oracle SOA is well-designed, it is a product that we've implemented many times over and we've built a lot of best practices to help customers understand the complexity or take some of the complexity out. Because at the end of the day it is a platform, it's not a shrink wrapped solution. It's a platform that you have to be able to build things on and if you're not building things the right way, you can easily create what we call 'spaghetti architecture'. Which is building a bunch of point-to-point integrations between these systems that is not loosely coupled, not reusable and not scalable because they're not following good design patterns. If you're going that approach which unfortunately we see some customers do, then that could get you in trouble. We've got some frameworks and some solutions on how to avoid those types of architectures and designs.

We have a checklist because we actually end up being independent advisors, we've helped a number of customers with evaluation, score carding and selection. Because at the end of the day SOA Suite is not the only product out there. There's other products such as MuleSoft, WSO2, they all have integration platforms too that Oracle is competing with. It really is what platform is the best for the customer? Some of the key criteria, what we see are how easy is it for a developer to build integrations, how quickly can they do it, how quickly can they deploy their applications to products? Does it integrate well with DevOps and version control systems? How robust is their login and analytics? Some of these are key fundamental features for a lot of enterprise-level customers. Those need to work or the customer can really get themselves in trouble if for example a transaction fails. What do I do? If you don't have good features in the product to recover from such situations, that can lead to a lot of headaches for a lot of our Fortune 2000 clients.

Rating: I would give it a solid eight. I want to say ten but nothing is perfect. Gartner does rate it as one of the leading vendors in their quadrants, so that's always good as well. We've seen a lot of adoption, a lot of Oracle customers have bought it and it's got a lot of good features. The reason why I may not give it a nine or 10 are some of the things that we talked about earlier, some of the potential weaknesses around cloud enablement, lightweight enablement, pricing, things like these. That have been a little bit of inhibitors to some of the smaller and medium-sized customers and around API management as well.

From an enterprise service bus, SOA-level product, we definitely think it's one of the leaders out there. We can certainly help a customer with an evaluation and selection, you can learn more at our website, visualintegrator.com. Some of the things I would absolutely look at, at least three to five vendors in this space, come up with your key use cases, your key functional use cases, your key technical use cases, provide waiting criteria on those and scorecard these vendors. Scorecard then on their capabilities, ask them to do a proof of concept, always important. A lot of them will do developer day workshops with you.

Ask them to do something like this and really take a look at a selection of vendors to see what is the best fit for your organization. Because the reality is you have choices out there and SOA Suite maybe the perfect fit for you, it may not be the perfect fit for you. You really have to take a look at it and say, "Does it fit my needs with their features, with their pricing, with support and so forth?" Really do that level of evaluation and selection. That's one of the things we actually incidentally specialize in helping customers with as independent advisors. Certainly if a customer were to do that, those are the things I would certainly focus on.

I think in my role, the most valuable feature of the product is the declarative way of orchestrating your web server engines instead of having to code it all manually.

Once it's in production, for the organization, I think the most valuable feature is it's the ability to track and trace every single message all the way from the beginning to the end.

We're Oracle partners, so we're implementing it for our customers. I think for them it means being able to reuse their current IT assets and having access to that information in their current systems. Another improvement to their organizations is reducing the time to market for building an integration.

It depends a little bit on the perspective. From my perspective, I think the development experience, the refactoring, could be improved. And the way that the design-side metadata storage is implemented.

I think from an organizational perspective, the audit options can be improved by making it easier in terms of business terms. A lot of the new features that they're implementing right now, I think will help that. It's not just technical, but also has more business semantics.

I think I've been using the product since 2007.

It is a stable product. Of course, it's an IT product, so sometimes there's versions that need patches, but the patches are being released regularly. In production, the product is extremely stable. I think sometimes the development tool could have issues, especially with new versions. The first version sometimes needs a patch, but the production environment has always been very stable.

It's an extremely scalable product. We have projects with very high throughput, and also there's a lot of tuning possibilities to make the messages extremely fast.

There are a lot of support resources available: Oracle support, forums, articles, blogs, and product management. We have a close relationship with product management, so we discuss solutions with them. There's the A-Team that can help out. In terms of technical support, there's a lot of possibilities. And then, of course, the partner ecosystem that we are a part of offers a few options, as well.

I think for a developer instance, it's straightforward. You can just follow the wizard and click Next, Next, Next. For production, it's quite complex. For every other element in your IT, because it's an integration product, so naturally it has complexity because you need network connectivity, you need to know what type of storage, you need high availability, and you need to tune it.

I think that one of the things that can ease that is automation of the installation. We use scripts for that, so we don't forget anything. Of course, the other option is the SOA Suite in the cloud. Oracle took away part of the complexity by offering the wizards in the cloud.

With traditional programming languages, you have to build a lot of the web servers and integration stuff manually, which is very error-prone and time-consuming. Compared to that, I think this product is a huge improvement.

I think if you compare it to competitors, it's very strong in the operation side of things because you can track and trace everything very easily, as well as the ease of use of integrations.

There are many facets to this product, but we have primarily been making use of SCA, BPEL, Mediators, and JMS, along with a number of extension products. We are expecting to make extensive use of several other aspects of the SOA (and its containing WebLogic server) in the near future, specifically OSB and Coherence.

It has allowed us to build integrations using an enterprise-class platform. It has also meant that we have been able to purchase prebuilt integrations from Oracle for their products, meaning we have been able to focus largely on our own solutions.

It should be noted, and we have proven with our own experience, that to really get good value out of the product you need to have some good development approaches, as well as knowledgeable people on the team because middleware is very easy to do badly, and then it becomes an impediment. As they say, with great power comes great responsibility.

With the availability of Maven the adoption of Continous Integration can be really driven fowards.

Configuration of the product is a very complex and demands a lot of knowledge, but we do recognize this is the process to pay for a flexible platform. Nevertheless, providing simplified tools for common activities would be very helpful.

My employer has been using Oracle SOA Suite for three to four years. I have been working as an architect for this amount of time as well.

Deployments are complex.

Once correctly configured, scaling and stability have not been an issue. When issues have occurred, we have traced the problems back to poor deployment configuration, particularly environment factors such as the network, etc.

Oracle official support channels can be a bit slow (although no worse then any other significant vendor, e.g. Red Hat). But there is a wealth of information in the Oracle community that can help, and it is possible to seek help through the community if you know how.

Additionally, if you have appropriate contacts within Oracle, then you can reach out that way as well and typically see friendly, responsive engagement.

We have in the past heavily used Red Hat's Fuse products. They're also good, but require a far greater level of investment in good development skills to exploit. The need for more basic development skills has meant the development of the ISO of on-site integration practices.

It's complex for 11g, but in getting started with the new 12c platform, we have seen far greater development although production environment are still a fairly sophisticated task.

The majority of the work we have had done with Oracle SOA Suite has been through a major systems integrator with a few internal individuals with some knowledge for basic operational support. Given the choice, use smaller specialist Oracle partners -- they may cost more per person, but they know how to get the most out of the platform and can deliver a lot more in the same time. The big SIs we have seen approach things with just training staff to use the tools and then assume that is good enough, rather than invest in the underlying principles and support the development of good skills through experience.

Do some upfront work to figure out what you're likely to want to do with the technology and get some meaningful volumetrics before you start negotiating on licensing. The Oracle PaaS platform offers an opportunity to try and see and understand the art of the possible before you start ramping up. Without this, you may find that you buy into license constraints to keep the cost down and then later regret the constraints. Understand how to get the most of the pre-sales engagement. Oracle can offer a lot here to help you bottom out the right solutions to make sure you get it.

If you're starting from scratch with Oracle, seed your team with some resources who have knowledge and reputation. Invest in your own people to develop knowledge in the breadth of the tool. Even if you use SLS to deliver, having some knowledge of your own can help hold them to account. This is most critical if you've engaged them on a fixed-price model as they will want to keep the cost down, which might work to your best interests.

Service orchestration using BPEL and OSB is the feature most used. JMS integration for reliable messaging is probably the most valuable feature.

Pub/Sub is an integration pattern very commonly used. SOA/WebLogic provides easy-to-use JMS services that can be used in BPEL or OSB. This is the only way to guarantee the delivery of messages. Any message that needs guaranteed delivery has to go over JMS.

The product allows loose coupling between applications. We no longer use point-to-point integration or tightly coupled integration. This provides reusability of services and ease of integration.

In the previous 11g release, there wasn't any straightforward support for calling or exposing REST services with JSON payloads. REST support was released with version 12c (12.1.3 to be specific). With this version, a REST adapter was introduced, which can be used for calling REST services or exposing OSB or BPEL as a REST service. Embedded JavaScript inside BPEL was another new feature to help work with REST/JSON services. It was all good, but using them is not very straightforward. There's no proper documentation or tutorial for embedding JavaScript.

We have been using this solution for about seven years now. We started with version 11.1.1.4.

A new deployment or proper deployment takes a lot of time, planning and researching. Once you get your topology right, then scaling the infrastructure is not a big issue. Again, the documentation needs to be more specific about the things you need to keep in mind when starting with a new deployment.

I would rate it no more than 2.5/5. This is where they need to really improve the turnaround time. Issues usually take a bit of time to resolve. It's not an ideal scenario if you have a production issue.

We have used some parts of TIBCO BusinessWorks before. We did evaluate some other products and looked at Gartner, etc. Based on our experience and customer relations with Oracle, we decided to go with it.

Initial setup in the previous version was quite complex. It has improved a lot in the 12c version. Still, you need to configure quite a few things before you get it right. Some of the things are not easy to configure. Also, there are number of places where configuration is required and that makes it a bit tricky.

I will skip ROI. About pricing, if you have a good relationship with Oracle, it helps.

We are happy with the product. If someone is looking to implement it, they should really look to get their infrastructure right before you start implementing services.

We utilize SOA(Service Oriented Architecture) as a service tool to integrate between Oracle and the websites. Primarily as a service integration tool to communicate from many sources into our ERP system. Oracle SOA suite is the middle-ware (middleman) responsible to import all the orders into the Oracle system of records. Additionally we use SOA's B2B suit to integrate to our B2B partners.

I see it as a platform rather than an oracle traditional product.

It's a very critical tool for us. It not only helps us import the orders from our eCommerce platform, but it also helps us to integrate to other third-party products. Those third-party products could be home grown, or other B2C sites or business-to-business sites.

It also helps us keep up with the speed. Whenever we need a quick integration, it's a great tool to call services(any source/destination) and get the integration done on-time. We are less worried about integrating to any third party software because SOA being part of our footprint.

I would like to see better mobile-friendly services. Desktop use is diminishing and customers have moved to smart phones and other Mobil devices . SOA has some mobile services already, but they're not very user-friendly (may be also depending on what version of SOA you are using). We would like to see a focus on mobile-friendly web services moving forward.

The second important aspect I would like to get improved is the User Interfaces. Especially for troubleshooting purposes, I do see a room to improve how a support executive can figure out an issue. In the current world a lot of troubleshoot happens by viewing a payload , which is not the best way to figure out a problem. A better UI can help to minimize the troubleshoot time.

By and large it is a stable product in my experience. There are down sides as well, however. I think handling very high load, the product has to develop some more maturity. For example, the stability becomes problematic when we are processing millions of records at the same time. Putting up more infrastructure can always help.

Scalability and Stability are linked to each other as they impact each other.

It is scalable. You have to spend a little more money to scale it up. Our system handles transactions and products both. If we segregate and have parallel systems(servers) for transactions v/s products, it can be a better performing system.

(5/10)Oracle does not offer support that meets our expectations. We need in-house expertise so that can we manage. You cannot rely on Oracle support. It's an Oracle product at the end of the day, but I don't think the support is up to the mark.There are less knowledgeable people on SOA compared to the other Oracle propriety products.

It all depends on the business model of the company selecting a solution. It's not a complex tool in terms of building/utilizing services. It is a comprehensive service mediation tool and can handle heterogeneous service integrations . Businesses can utilize it as key performance tool as well. SOA allows enterprises to use BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), a run time business matrix from the various applications to provide important insight into the health of its operations and business activities.

Depending on how an enterprise explores it and leverages it, there are lot of benefits that can be reaped out of this comprehensive tool.

Recommendations:

I would recommend that people have some in-house expertise to handle this product. People who really want to use this solution need to know the product well before they use it.

Single development and multiple deployments are very valuable features of this product.

Cost-wise it is a very economical option because I don't have to hire separate iOS developers and Android developers. All I need is to select one developer and once it's developed, I can just deploy it into iOS, Android, Windows and so on. Thus, in this way, it severely reduces my costs.

It needs improvement in terms of Windows support. Actually, it's there but is not that good. So, I need something on Windows support.

Right now, the availability of quicker releases is delayed. In the mobile world, you need it right now; you can't afford to wait. I don't want to wait for six months to get it. If I have faster features availability, that would be great.

Initially, during our first time, we had some problems. Now, we are good.

It scales well to our needs.

We did check out other tools in the market namely Xamarin but we are comfortable with this one.

You should go for it. It is quite user-friendly and the tutorials are hands-on. You just go through the tutorials.